Element <y> not permitted anywhere...

[Telyt]

HI. I have searched the forums, an found a few similar threads, but their solutions have not solved my problem.

I am writing a history of photograhy, and have hundreds of paragraphs much like this one...

<p><y>1614</y> An Italian chemist, Angelo Sala, notes that silver nitrate turns black when exposed to the sun, but he sees nothing significant in the change and does not ascribe it to the action of light.</p>

Which formats as:

1614 An Italian chemist, Angelo Sala, notes that silver nitrate turns black when exposed to the sun, but he sees nothing significant in the change and does not ascribe it to the action of light.

The CSS contains this code:

y {
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
font-family: Arial Black, sans-serif;
text-indent: 2em;
text-align: left;
}

The book is written with Calibre (ePub) and Caliber's "Check book" says it's fine. I can load the file into Sigil and check it with Flightcrew and it passes, without errors. I have uploaded the book to KOBO.com, and KOBO accepts it, as well. I've sold several copies and people have said they love it! So, where's the problem?

I'd like to sell through Smashwords, and so I've run it through ePubCheck, only to get hundreds of errors - one for every entry. "Element y is not allowed anywhere".

Please! What am I doing wrong?

Many thanks, for any and all help.

Telyt.

[theducks]

<y>
Where (what standard) is this markup defined?

<span class="y">1963</span> might be a safer way
where you have a CSS .y { stuff }

[eschwartz]

Because you made up

<y>

and it has absolutely no idea what one is...

This is not XML, you do not define your own elements.

The appropriate way to add styles to an arbitrary text fragment is through the use of
<span class="myclass">text goes here</span>

[kovidgoyal]

Epubcheck loves to complain about hundreds of "problems" that aren't actually problems in real world usage. Unfortunately, if you want to sell through a vendor that uses epubcheck you have to jump through the epubcheck hoops, calibre will not do that automatically for you.

calibre will only produce epubcheck valid output if you give it epubcheck valid input. In this case simply replace <y> with <span class="y"> as the ducks told you. You should be able to do it fairly easily with the search and replace function in the editor.

[Telyt]

Thank you, all three of you!

The secret, for my simple mind, was the period, in front of the "y" in the naming of the CSS code, as provided by theducks. I tried it, and it works, perfectly.

And thank you, Kovigoyal, for a wonderful program for writing ebooks (as well as your kind advice!)

David (Telyt).